


your parasympathetic nervous system reacts

by Duck_Life



Category: New Mutants, X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Aftermath, Family, Friendship, Gen, New Mutants: Dead Souls - Freeform, Recovery, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-01
Updated: 2018-09-01
Packaged: 2019-07-05 08:51:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15860301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duck_Life/pseuds/Duck_Life
Summary: The T-O virus is gone and they're all back to normal... whatever the hell "normal" means now for Xi'an. Set after the events of New Mutants: Dead Souls #6.





	your parasympathetic nervous system reacts

“There’s someone in your head waiting to fucking strangle you.”  
\- AJJ, “People Ii: The Reckoning”

The photograph is from the mid-eighties by Xi’an’s guess, ‘85 or ‘86. Her hair in the picture looks even shorter than it does now, and Rahne is so young. So goddamn young. Hank McCoy is explaining to them in exhaustive detail the symptoms they have to look forward to for the next couple of days, because technarch wreaks havoc on your body and even once it’s gone from your system you still have to deal with the aches and migraines and vertigo. Xi’an knows she should probably pay attention but she can’t stop looking at the framed photograph hanging on the wall behind him.

As soon as McCoy finishes whatever the hell he’s saying, the pretense of civility drops. Illyana looks away from McCoy to glare fiercely at her, and Xi’an doesn’t feel particularly angry or afraid. She just feels… empty.

Not completely empty, of course. The transmode virus may be gone but her brother is still rooted in her mind, clinging to her soul, and she’s forgotten what it’s like to live any other way. Forgotten how to be.

McCoy leaves and Doug pulls Warlock into a corner and starts speaking to him softly. Xi’an tries to listen for a moment before realizing it’s a language she doesn’t understand. Dani walks right up to her, meets her eyes, and then brushes past her. It stings more than if she had slapped her.

Illyana whirls on her. “Are you happy now, Shan?” she snarls. “You use your fucking friends as experiments and then the X-Men clean up your mess? I should—” She lunges toward Xi’an, but Rahne hauls her back by the shoulder.

“Forget it, ‘Yana,” Rahne says. “She’s not worth it.”

That stings, too, but Xi’an doesn’t say anything. Rahne and Illyana leave, and so does Guido. Sam claps her on the shoulder and ‘Berto offers her a kind of half-smile, half-grimace, and then they’re gone, too, leaving her alone with Doug and Warlock.

She never wanted this. She was just doing what she could to keep herself together. And now everything’s fallen apart.

“I’m…”

Doug turns around to look at her with those sad, soft eyes. “I know,” he says quietly.

* * *

Unsure of where else to go, Xi’an winds up sitting on the steps of the Xavier Institute, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. She possesses a passing bird for a few minutes, enjoying the light, uncomplicated feeling of flying and fluttering.

A hand on her shoulder shakes her out of it.

“Who— ?!”

“Sorry, sorry,” the boy says, hopping back. Back in her own head, Xi’an recognizes him right away.

“Victor,” she says, smiling despite her shitty mood. She’s been so busy running Hatchi Tech, she hasn’t had time to visit the mansion in a while. It’s good to see his familiar, green face. “Hey, kid.”

“I brought you dinner,” he says, holding out a paper plate of green beans and baked chicken. “Thought you might be hungry. And… none of the New Mutants really seemed like they were going to bring you anything, so. Here.” He hands the plate to her, and after a moment, sits down beside her. “I don’t know what that’s about.”

Xi’an stares down at the plate in her lap. “Um. I…”

“I don’t want to know, to be clear,” Vic says quickly, holding his hands up to ward off any long explanations. “I get enough secondhand drama from all the X-Men around here. I don’t need to know about New Mutant drama. I just… _somebody_ should be checking on you, Karma.”

She turns to look at him, surprised that _he_ feels like he needs to take care of _her_ , and that’s when she really gets a good look at him. He’s grown into himself, into his scales, and even the arm that isn’t huge is roped with muscle. “ _Merde_ ,” she mumbles. “When did you grow up?”

“Sometime between Scarlet-Witch-takes-all-our-powers-away and Inhumans-try-to-kill-us-with-clouds,” he snarks. “I’m not that old. I still don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”

“None of us do,” Xi’an sighs, shoveling green beans into her mouth. “Get used to that.”

Victor looks behind him at the Institute doors and then back at Xi’an. “So… I _still_ don’t want to know any details, but uh, did this whole… ‘debacle’ have anything to do with your new New Mutants team?” She shoots him a sideways glance. “Which I know nothing about! Just, uh, my friend Lin is friends with Rictor, and he was talking about it one day.”

“I… yes, yeah, it has something to do with that team,” she says evasively, chewing. She swallows and then thinks for a moment. “Lin Li is friends with Rictor?”

“Uh, yeah, I think she found him in the park one day… ‘communing’ with the Earth while she was ‘communing’ with the trees? It’s a whole thing,” he shrugs, his massive lizard arm moving up and down. “So, like, a mission went wrong or something?”

“Make up your mind, Vic,” she laughs. “Do you want to know or not?”

“I do and I don’t,” he sighs. “I mean. Do you need to talk about it?”

She takes a huge bite of chicken and chews it for a long time. “No,” she says. “Maybe. I don’t _want_ to talk about it.”

“Then we don’t have to talk about it,” Vic says simply. “We can talk about something else. Um, did you say those pics Roxy put on Instagram from all of us at Pride?”

Xi’an smiles. “No, I didn’t.”

“Here, I’ll show you,” Vic says, pulling out his phone.

* * *

There’s enough rooms in the Institute that Xi’an’s able to sleep in an empty one all by herself. She’s on the floor, about to remove her prosthetic for the night, when someone knocks on her door.

 _If that’s Dani_ , she thinks, moving toward the door, _I can’t handle this tonight. I just—_

It’s Rachel.

“Oh,” Xi’an says, pushing her hair back out of her eyes. “Rache, I— ”

“We need to figure out what we’re going to do about your brother,” Rachel says bluntly, pushing past her into the bedroom. “Sorry I wasn’t here earlier, I was out on a mission. But I’m back now, and… we need a plan.”

“It’s fine,” Xi’an mumbles. “I’ve got him under control.”

“Oh, of course, my mistake,” she says acidly. “ _That’s_ why you forced your friends and teammates to assimilate with Warlock and then tried to turn them over to O*N*E.”

“Rachel, can we please just talk about this tomorrow?”

“We’re talking about it now,” Rachel says. “You’re not the first person to try and use their own head as a jail cell. It never ends well— just ask Psylocke.” Her face softens. “I know this is scary as hell, Shan. It’s going to be okay. We… we have a containment field in the basement. Hank’s used it before to secure psionic entities. Tran doesn’t have to die, but you can’t keep carrying him around.”

“He’s already dead,” Xi’an says, feeling out-of-breath despite standing still. “I killed him. I mean… I mean, I made Illyana kill him because I n-needed him. What the hell’s wrong with me?” She covers her mouth with her hand, hating the idea that Rachel Grey is going to see her cry.

“You’re human,” Rachel says. “You spent ten years learning to live a certain way. Then Tran got too powerful and left and you didn’t know how to keep going. Anyone would have reacted the same.”

“The same?”

“Maybe not exactly the same,” Rachel amends. “Look, I know what it’s like to lose a brother. I get how hard this is for you.”

“I don’t know who I am without him in my head,” Xi’an says, horrified even as she says it. Her brother was ruthless and desparate for control and power. He never cared about stepping over other people’s boundaries. Shouldn’t she be relieved at the chance to get away from him? At the chance to get her life back?

That’s the thing, though. She hasn’t been alone in her head in a very long time. What if it’s too quiet? What if she goes even crazier?

What if they excise the tumor that is her brother’s psyche, only to realize the truly evil one was her all along?

“You’re Xi’an Coy Manh,” Rachel says. “You’re an X-Man. You’re a hero. You have so much in your life that is _yours_ , Xi’an. Not your brother’s.”

“I just don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know that I can… can give him up like that.”

“You have to do what’s best for your family.”

She thinks about Dani and Doug, Illyana and Rahne. “I doubt any of them think of me as ‘family’ right now, Rachel.”

“Yeah, well I wasn’t talking about them.”

As if on cue, Kitty Pryde nudges the door open and comes in carting Nga and Leong. “She’s in here, guys,” she says, ushering the kids into the room. They’ve gotten taller since she last saw them, and realizing that makes Xi’an’s heart ache. “Oh, hey Rache. The kids found out their sister was in the Institute and wanted to come see her.”

“Hey,” Xi’an says, hugging her little brother and sister. “How’s it going, you guys? How’s Xavier’s?”

“I have a new roommate and—”

“—  Chamber says we can go to London—”

“—  name’s Gabrielle she’s really cool—”

“— see Big Ben and Westminster—”

“Whoa, okay, one at a time,” Xi’an laughs, leading Nga and Leong to go sit on the bed with her. Nga starts happily chatting about her new roommate, with Rachel and Kitty watching from the doorway.

<This is your family, Xi’an,> Rachel speaks to her telepathically. <Think about what’s going to keep them safe.>

Xi’an listens to Nga and squeezes her and Leong tightly and imagines what Tran might have done if he’d managed to get his hands on them, if he’d turned them into O*N*E, or worse.

<Okay,> she says back to Rachel. <Okay. Tomorrow.>

* * *

Tomorrow, Rachel leads her down to McCoy’s labratory, where Kitty and McCoy are waiting. In the center of the room, they’ve wheeled out a plexiglass case with an excess of wires and technojunk attached to it.

Despite owning a million-dollar tech company, Xi’an still doesn’t know much at all about electronics outside of the ones in her leg and the ones that keep her laptop running.

McCoy starts attaching nodes to her forehead and temples, and Xi’an tries not to flinch. “Rachel will extract your brother’s psyche,” McCoy explains, methodically checking the connectors on all the wires. “And then these wires direct the excess psionic energy into the containment core.”

“This is what you did with Quentin Quire,” Xi’an remembers.

“Yes, well,” McCoy says. “He was being a punk. He’s better now.”

“Eh,” Kitty says. “Jury’s out.”

Xi’an gets hooked up and then Rachel comes to stand in front of her, framing her face lightly between her hands. “Deep breaths, Xi’an,” Rachel says, shutting her eyes as a halo of telepathic energy starts glowing around her head. “I promise to be careful.”

When Tran first slipped out of her mind months ago, Xi’an hadn’t realized. She’d _noticed_ something, woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night with the familiar feeling that she was forgetting something important, but she hadn’t felt the actual loss itself, just the aftereffects.

She feels it this time. It’s like pulling a thorn out of your foot, only so much worse. When she was younger, Magneto told all of them once that if they were ever stabbed, don’t pull the knife out. Leave it in, because it’s holding all the blood in and if you pull it out you’ll probably bleed out.

She feels like she’s bleeding out now, bleeding out memories and thoughts and feelings and everything that makes her _her_ . For a fleeting moment, she sees McCoy’s machine light up and she realizes she’s alone in her head, and she’s _falling_ , lost in the sensation of being the only one there.

And then suddenly that familiar presence shoots back into her head. The machine makes a loud whine and a large crack appears in the plexiglass. Rachel jumps back like she’s been shocked, and her nose is bleeding a little.

“What happened?” Xi’an demands, feeling like she just ran a marathon.

“He’s too strong for psychic containment,” Rachel pants. “The machine couldn’t hold him. It’s actually… a good thing that you pulled him back somewhere where you _could_ hold him or else… I don’t want to know what would have happened.”

“So I need him out of my head,” Xi’an says, irritated, “but the machine you built to do that isn’t strong enough.”

“Tran Coy Manh can’t be reliably contained without the presence of a dominant psyche pushing him down,” McCoy theorizes.

“What about Xi’an?” Rachel huffs. “She can’t just keep this up. I mean, look what’s happened already!”

“It’s concerning, I agree,” McCoy says. “But without a better solution—”

“What if we split him up?” Kitty speaks up, interrupting McCoy. “What if Tran’s psyche were split between multiple people?”

Rachel stares at her. “Like the Phoenix Five?”

“Now there’s an idea,” McCoy says, scratching the wisps of blue fur on his chin.

“It would have to be completely voluntary,” Kitty continues. “We can’t force that on anyone who doesn’t explicitly consent. And it would have to be enough people to dilute his psyche enough that he couldn’t seize control or manipulate them like he did with Xi’an and Hatchi Tech.”

“Yeah, right,” Xi’an says. “Who the hell’s gonna volunteer for that?”

“Well,” Kitty says. “Me.”

“And me.”

They all whirl around to see Dani Moonstar peeking through the door into the lab. “Dani?” Xi’an says. “But… I thought you were angry with me.”

“Oh, I am,” Dani assures her, stepping fully into the lab. “I’m furious. But I still love you, Xi’an. Loving you doesn’t make the anger go away… but the anger doesn’t make the love go away. You understand?” She looks at Kitty. “Count me in, Kit-Kat.”

“Me too,” Doug says following behind Dani.

“`Self as well.`”

“Warlock, you don’t have to do that,” Xi’an sighs. “If it’s even possible. I mean, after everything…”

“`Self/friend helped self despite the possible negative outcomes,” `Warlock says definitively. “`Self will help self/friend.`”

“Aye,” Rahne agrees, coming into the lab with Sam and ‘Berto. “We all will.”

“Yep,” Sam says.

“You know it,” ‘Berto confirms.

Xi’an looks around the room at her friends, tasting the sick-sweet taste at the roof of her mouth that comes from holding back tears. It doesn’t work; she cries anyway. “Guys, you… you don’t have to do this.”

“Xi’an,” Sam says, stepping forward and putting a hand on her shoulder. “What’d we do when ‘Yana lost her soul and dragged us ta Limbo?”

“... Tried to help her,” Xi’an mumbles.

“What? Can’t hear ya.”

“Tried to help her,” Xi’an says, looking up at him.

Warlock puts his hand on Doug’s shoulder. “`And when self/soul/friend returned from the dead and attempted to kill us all, what did self and self/friends do?`”

“Tried to help him,” Xi’an says.

Dani smiles. “And what’d we do when Sam—”

“Hey, what did I do?”

“You know what you did, Guthrie.”

“You’ve been carrying this alone for too long,” Kitty says. “We’re pitching in.”

Xi’an looks around at them, the New Mutants, her friends. Over the past year she’s used them, lied to them, assimilated them, copied them with techno-organic facsimiles because she convinced herself she was chasing some greater good. She did all that… and they still want to help.

So maybe there’s more to her than desperation and immoral ambition. There’s got to be something else in her that managed to win over everyone in this room.

Maybe someday she’ll figure out what that is.

* * *

With only an eighth of Tran’s psyche still attached to her, Xi’an thought she might feel adrift, or off-center. She feels more centered than ever before, though. The piece of her brother that’s still a part of her doesn’t speak, doesn’t twist or manipulate, doesn’t influence her the way she had become used to.

But he’s there, still. It’s the same feeling as eating pho that’s almost as good as her mother’s, or seeing the moon low and huge in the sky.

The others say they don’t really feel anything, and that’s likely for the best.

“So,” Dani says, pinning a pair of Jubilee’s jorts to the line, “now what?” Noriko shorted out the laundry room again, so they have to hang up all the clothes that had been in the washing machines.

“Now,” Xi’an says, hanging up a pair of cargo shorts that have _got_ to belong to Bobby Drake, “I get my life back in order. Starting with Hatchi Tech.”

Dani watches her over the clothesline. “You’re going back, huh?” she says. “You’re going to run Hatchi Tech the right way?”

“Yeah, I am,” Xi’an says. “By not running it.” She pins up a Cyclops Was Right t-shirt. “I don’t know why I stayed on as owner in the first place. That company started out under the leadership of my evil half-sister and ended up being manipulated by my evil brother. It’s a mess.”

“Hey, maybe you should let Nga and Leong run it,” Dani suggests.

“Oh, yeah, there’s an idea,” Xi’an laughs. “No, no, I’ve got my eye on some people I think would be good for the position. The thing is, Hatchi Tech’s done too much work for me to just sell the company to the highest bidder. I can’t risk any of that technology or information getting into the wrong hands. I was thinking one person to handle the tech stuff, and one person to keep Hatchi on the up-and-up. Kind of a moral watchdog.”

“Got anyone in mind?”

“Kitty’s the obvious choice,” Xi’an says, putting Shark-Girl’s socks on the clothesline. “I trust her to know what’s best for mutants, and she’d even understand the tech stuff. But she’s way too busy. You got any suggestions?”

Dani thinks for a moment, putting up a pair of Eye-Boy’s jeans on the line. (She can tell, because in addition to having holes in the knees there are a couple holes sporadically cut into the calves and thighs so he can see out of them.) “What about David?” she says. “He’s got a good head on his shoulders. And he’s _still_ a fast learner.”

“Hm,” Xi’an says, looking down at the laundry basket.

“What, you don’t think he can handle it?”

“Just,” she sighs. “He didn’t stop me.”

“It wasn’t his job then,” she points out. “If he were ready for it, in the right context… I think he’d do a great job, Xi’an.”

She hangs up a Lila Cheney tank top. “I think you’re right,” she says. “I’m just terrified of David making my mistakes.”

“He’ll make his own mistakes,” Dani assures her. “Just like we did.” She hangs up a t-shirt she remembers buying for Josh. “What about the tech person? Who’s that going to be?”

“Oh, I know who I want for the job,” Xi’an says. “I’m going to go meet with them later this week.”

* * *

 “Well,  Miss Coy Manh, I am flattered that you came to me. I suppose I could incorporate Hatchi Tech into Stark Industries,” Tony says, leaning back against the desk behind him. “But I don’t have the resources right now to actually run another tech company.”

Xi’an tries to resist the urge to roll her eyes. “Oh, Mr. Stark, I’m sorry, you misunderstood,” she says quickly. “I’m actually just here because there’s someone I was hoping you could help me get in touch with. _That’s_ who I want to run Hatchi Tech with Prodigy.”

“Oh,” Tony says, deflating a bit. “Right, okay. So, uhm, what, uh, what can I help you with then?”

“Do you know where I can find Riri Williams?”


End file.
